Conspiracy theory

“About a Secret Crocodile”, by R.A. Lafferty, is a clever conspiracy theory story. In this tale, Lafferty writes of a secret society called the Crocodile that controls “the attitudes and dispositions of the world.” He goes on to note that the Crocodile has various parts and that “…Powerful among these is a society of 399 persons that manufactures all the catchwords and slogans of the world. This subsociety is not completely secret since several members are mouthy: The code name of this apparatus is the Crocodile’s Mouth.”

In one of those wonderful coincidences, I happened to re-read this classic science fiction story shortly before watching various political pundits tossing out their talking points (“nuclear option”, “ramming it down America‘s throat”, “delay is our enemy”). Seeing them, I had to say “damn, look at those little crocodiles!”

While I am not a conspiracy theorist, it is certainly interesting to survey the various opinion makers, pundits, talking point parrots and others and see the incredible uniformity of ideas and phrases. In the case of politics, there is no need to seek out secret societies shaping attitudes and dispositions. It is largely done right out in the open, our Donkey and our Elephant (with his little buddy, Fox).

Naturally, it can be argued that this is just what political parties do: they use all the means at their disposal to shape the attitudes and dispositions of folks so as to acquire and keep power. “Nothing wrong with this, business as usual”, one might say.

Of course, it does seem reasonable to be concerned about such machinery that exists to shape the attitudes and dispositions of people. After all, while they cannot (as of yet) practice true mind control, they can shape public opinion in ways quite contrary to what is best for the public. This can be said of both the Democrats and the Republicans. While folks do like to think that the fact that there two parties gives us a choice, this is not really much of a choice. True, the Donkey and the Elephant do battle it out, but they do so in a very limited way. At the end of the day,one might say, the same basic sort of politician is always elected. There is, unfortunately, no real opposition to the overall Crocodile, the beast that defines how politics as a whole is conducted. In fact, there can be no real opposition: a new group would just be another organ of the Crocodile. Right?

As noted in my previous post, a recent Pew Research Center survey found that 29% of Americans believe that news organizations get their facts straight while 63% claim that news stories often are lacking in accuracy. 26% also claim that news organizations are careful to avoid politically biased reporting. 60% of those surveyed claimed that the news organizations are politically biased.

In my previous post, I considered that one explanation for these views is that the media is biased and error prone. Of course, it is also worthwhile exploring alternative (or additional) explanations.

One possible cause of this view is that fact that folks on the right have been claiming that the media is biased since about the time of the Nixon administration. This trend has continued and it is likely that this charge has influenced the views of some people.

Another possible cause is that people are generally poor at critical thinking and hence generally do not consider their own biases. If someone is unaware of his own biases, then they will tend to see the world with an uncorrected distortion-that created by their own biases. As such, even an objective and accurate report will strike them as either inaccurate or biased (or both). To use an analogy, when students come to talk to me about a bad paper grade, they often insist that their papers are quite good. Even when I show the fallacies, grammatical errors, missing material, factual errors and such in their work, they sometimes still insist that the papers are good. In some cases I am sure they are quite sincere they truly think their papers are fine pieces of work, despite the fact that they are not. Likewise, someone who sees the world in a biased way and is not aware of his bias will tend to see anything that disagrees with his view as mistaken.

Interestingly, Thomas Hobbes wrote about this tendency. He notes in his Leviathan that people tend to regard a failure to agree with them as a sign of provocative disagreement. As such, when folks see a news story that simply fails to agree with their beliefs, they will tend to regard it as biased, inaccurate or both.

Adding to this is the fact that sources outside of the mainstream media are highly polarized, both left and right. This enables folks to easily find sources (often blogs and web pages) that “confirm” and “support” there views. This, in turn, can contribute to their belief that the news media is inaccurate and biased. For example, folks who think that Bush was behind 9/11 can find sites to back them up and “confirm” their conspiracy theory. As another example, folks who think that Obama is not a natural born American can find sites to “support” their views.

While it is a good idea to find outside sources and use them to check on the mainstream media, it is important to make sure that these sources are credible and accurate. That can, of course, be rather challenging.

My view is that it is wise to be critical of the media (or any source). However, it is equally wise to critical of one’s own beliefs. After all, if the media can be biased, so can we.